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Does anyone know why some keyword rankings go from nowhere in the top 50 to ranking 1st to then nowhere in the top 50 in the space of 3 weeks?

SEOMOZ told me to ask the question here because they say their ranking programme now works correctly and the problems I was having before with keywords changing so dramatically, even though nothing had been changed with regards to optmisation, is now to do with google rather than their ranking tool

do google really change their algorithms on a weekly basis so that rankings can go up by more than 50 to ranking 1st to then going down by more than 50?

Any hints or tips from anyone on I can keep the rankings more consistent (maybe dropping or increasing by one or two places week by week rather than changing by over 50 positions?)

4 Responses

From what I understand, if it's a new site or there have recently been a lot of changes to the site, it's not unusual for there to be a lot of fluctuations before it settles into the position where it will stick.

the old google dance. Normally this used to happen during algorithm changes and tweaks, you were seeing results bumping and dropping during a whole week, but now that's not the case.

As gfiedel said if your site is new, when google first index it, finds it really fresh and new and as all the new contents usually puts it quite high in their rankings, then after a day or so starts to change its position because of it being not so fresh, the parameters of its ranking are different. After a week or so you'll be sure that your site won't move anymore (if you don't change anything else sure :-) )

Well the site has been active for 10 months and most pages have very consistent keywords. It just seems strange that for a page that hasn't changed for 10 months it can go from not in the top 50 to ranking 1st to not in the top 50 in the last 3 weeks for 2 different keywords...

but maybe google is seeing it as a new website? even though we used to rank highly for those same keywords on the old website (which was active for 4 years) with all relevant 301 redirects in place

user metrics - Google has thought to have been using things like click through rate, and when users bounce back to the SERP and click on another result - as part of their algorithm. In other words, they have user metrics (kind of like their own analytics) to detect how happy users are with the results in the SERPs - and I have heard that this is a possible cause for "the Google Dance"

multiple pages alternate rankings for one keyword - maybe you have a few pages that are similar in content, and Google has a hard time figuring out which is which - and the ranking page for a particular keyword keeps switching - this would cause dramatically different rankings.

could be the nature of weekly rank tracking - Moz rank tracking IS accurate for sure - but Google will sometimes move things around slightly. If Moz happens to check the ranking in this small window, where Google has shifted something for just a moment, then it looks like for the entire week you've been in a totally different position.

Suggestions

evaluate your "search queries" metrics - in webmaster tools they give you metrics like "impressions" and "click through rate" - check them out for the keywords in question that are seeing the Google Dance. You can pull this data from WMT into analytics quite easily. See if you're getting poor metrics for click through rate.

ALSO - webmaster tools will give you their average position (ranking!) straight from Google. look at what THEY have for your average position for those keywords - maybe you're jumping there too.

look at how many landings pages there are for one keyword - using webmaster tools or analytics data, see if one keyword is resulting in many landing pages. If so, try to focus just one page on the topic for each keyword.

supplement weekly rankings - run SEO Book's rank checker (free plugin) a few other times during the week and see what you come up. As mention above, look at webmaster tools average position data (rankings!) and compare data.

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